Rep. Joe “You lie!” Wilson now trailing in his reelection bid against Rob Miller, 44-43, according to a new poll.
“In a matter of seconds Joe Wilson turned himself from a safe incumbent into one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the country for 2010,” the pollster observes.
Here’s a funny, somewhat humiliating, political story. It turns out that Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) may be in a bit of trouble for reelection next year. His approval rating is an awful 38% and though he appears to be beating all the potential fairly unknown opponents, he’s clocking in in the low forties against all of them. With those numbers you’d figure that he’d either been a terrible senator, taken a few hikes on the Appalachian Trail or gotten seriously out of sync with his constituents on some big issue. But as Eric Kleefeld explains, it’s not really that Burr’s unpopular. It’s just that in almost six years as a senator he’s barely made any impression at all on the state’s electorate. It’s not that he’s too right or left or mired in scandal or even incompetent. He’s just so boring and lame that folks don’t have any particular opinion of him one way or another.
Unless Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) takes to the House floor to apologize for his “You lie!” outburst — which Democrats and reportedly some Republicans have been pressing him to do — Nancy Pelosi is prepared to greenlight a censure resolution as soon as next week.
Democrats had signaled that a censure vote for Rep. Wilson (R-SC) was not in the cards. But new reports have the Dems and particularly Speaker Pelosi telling Wilson that he must either apologize to the House or face a censure motion. On a strictly political calculus, it’s a little hard to figure. When someone is doing so much to damage themselves and their party, generally you try not to get in their way. The key, however, seems to be Wilson’s increasingly unrepentant attitude over the last two days and his refusal to go down to the well of the House and apologize to the body for his actions. Read More
I’ve seen this happen before. Rightwing group comes up with bogus ‘awards’ and ‘honors’ to sucker in egomaniac political contributors. But they get so hard up and desperate that they go and award one to someone in the porn business or something like that
Today it was Newt Gingrich’s turn.
Newt, or actually his 527 group American Solutions, named Allison Vivas of porn studio ‘Pink Visual’ as its “Entrepreneur of the Year.”
And she was more than game.
Late Update: If you really can’t get enough, here’s the actual letter granting the prestigious award.
I’m awarding the little known TPM Excellence in Deft Snark Award to Megan Carpentier of the Air America website for this sentence from a post on AARP’s poll on the president’s health care speech. The award is granted episodically for path-breaking combinations of AP Style and deadpan humor …
An overnight poll by AARP shows that Obama’s speech on health care helped resolve the concerns of many people over 45 dumb enough to believe braying Republicans that the Administration planned on executing the elderly.
Had I been editing I think I’d have stuck a “who say” between ‘Republicans’ and ‘that’. But that’s a minor quibble.
We were looking at this story earlier today but held off addressing it because it wasn’t clear whether it was tied to the victim’s political beliefs. But it seems it was.
Harlan James Drake, 33, is suspected of shooting Jim Pouillon, a 63 year old anti-abortion activist and Michael Fuoss, 63. Witnesses at the Pouillon shooting gave police a license plate number and description that quickly led them to Drake who then admitted he’d also murdered Fuoss about an hour earlier.
Drake apparently planned a third murder against an unidentified victim but was arrested before he had a chance to carry it out.
What makes this brutal story so odd and almost surreal is that Drake apparently had a unique set of grievances against each victim. Some personal, some political. According to police, Drake was “offended by the manner of Mr Pouillon’s message.” Pouillon was well-known in the community for frequently protesting outside local schools and churches with graphic photos of aborted fetuses. Meanwhile, Drake’s father had once worked at Fuoss’s Gravel company. So presumably his beef with Fuoss was familial, personal.
A reader reports in from the Conradian heart of crazy …
Joe Wilson’s not the only one bringing the crazy to DC. The town’s been invaded by teabaggers.
Was having a drink with a friend at a fancy downtown bar when two well-dressed men start chatting with us. Seemed friendly and normal enough until one asks how big we think the march tomorrow will be — “250,000? They say all the hotels are full!” I ask, “Are you here for that?” — and get an earful about how Medicare has a $35 trillion unfunded liability, every letter you mail costs $1 is taxes, and Obama is a Manchurian candidate who wants to create a million-person national civil defense force with a budget equal to the Penatagon’s.
Tomorrow should be fun.
Tea Partiers march on Washington, chanting “You lie!” That and other political news in today’s TPMDC Saturday Roundup.